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Spectators have role in security

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Saturday June 8, 2013 4:42 AM

The city of Columbus wants this year’s Fourth of July celebration Downtown to be the biggest,
most thrilling — and safest. To that end, officials from the city and Police and Fire Divisions met
and made a plan about how they will secure the annual Red White & Boom event down near the
Scioto riverfront.

The police say that nearly half the Division’s force will be involved in the event, plus
officials will use observation towers and crime cameras to scan the crowds and find trouble.

The immediate motivation for tighter security measures is April’s Boston Marathon bombing.
Regardless of that, it needed to happen: Whenever more than 500,000 people cram into a tiny area,
things can go bad quickly.

For people who are up to no good, the possibility of being caught on camera might be a
deterrent.

Revelers need to play their part, too. The police have asked that if people at the event see
suspicious behavior or objects, they tell authorities immediately. Also, officials aren’t
restricting the items people bring, but they say they would prefer that people pack lightly and
bring mesh or clear containers, marked with owners’ names and cellphone numbers.

Financial illiteracy has high costs for many Ohioans

It seems Ohioans can blame the recent recession only so much for their money woes. They appear
to be compounding them by lacking the basic financial knowledge to keep them from wasting
money.

A survey that was just released by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation shows that Ohioans
scored the fourth-worst in the country on a series of financial literacy questions, and were more
likely than those in other states to make questionable decisions about how to use their money.

Some circumstances might be out of Ohioans’ hands, such as 19 percent who were underwater on
their mortgages as of 2012, compared with 14 percent for the national average.

Being cash-strapped can force people into less-than-optimal decisions.

Ohioans were slightly more likely to use a payday lender, an advance on a tax return, a pawn
shop or a rent-to-own store. These options tend to come with steep interest rates. Forty-one
percent of Ohioans pay only the minimum balance on their credit cards, compared with 34 percent
nationally, meaning they’re paying more in interest and negatively affecting their credit
scores.

But it’s one thing to resort to such things with full knowledge, and an entirely different thing
to not understand basic financial concepts that could lead to better decisions. Sixty-seven percent
of Ohioans correctly answered three or fewer of five questions dealing with basic concepts such as
compound interest, mortgage terms and inflation.

This reinforces the fact that parents and schools need to be teaching everyday finance their
children.

Show them how to balance a checkbook. Talk to them about mortgages, car loans and credit
cards.

And for adults, it’s not too late: A variety of financial-literacy programs is available
locally, easily found with an Internet search.